Equally wonderful, perhaps more beautiful, is the joint work of Nature and Art on the sweet life and glory of flowers.  However many they were, and what they were, that breathed upon the first Spring or Summer day of time, each was a half-sealed gift of God to man, to be opened by his hand when his mind should open to a new sense of beauty and perfection.  Flowers, each with a genealogy reaching unbroken through the Flood back to the overhanging blossoms of Eden, have come down to us, as it were, only in their travelling costume, with their best dresses packed away in stamen, or petal, or private seedcase, to be brought out at the end of fifty centuries at the touch of human genius.  Those of which Solomon sang in his time, and which exceeded his glory in their every-day array, even “the hyssop by the wall,” never showed, on the gala-days of his Egyptian bride, the hidden charms which he, in his wisdom, knew not how to unlock.  Flowers innumerable are now, like illuminated capitals of Nature’s alphabet, flecking, with their sheen-dots, prairie, steppe, mountain and meadow, the earth around, which, perhaps, will only give their best beauties to the world in a distant age.  As the light of the latest-created and remotest stars has not yet completed its downward journey to the eye of man, so to his sight have not these sweet-breathing constellations of the field yet made the full revelation of their treasured hues and forms.  Not one in a hundred of them all has done this up to the present moment.  When one in ten of those that bless us with their life and being shall put on all its reserved beauty, then, indeed, the stars above and the stars below will stud the firmaments in which they shine with equal glory, and blend both in one great heaven-scape for the eye and heart of man.  One by one, in its turn, the key of human genius shall unlock the hidden wardrobe of the commonest flowers, and deck them out in the court dress reserved, for five thousand years, to be worn in the brighter, afternoon centuries of the world.  The Mistress of the Robes is a high dignitary in the Household of Royalty, and has her place near to the person of the Queen.  But the Floriculturist, of educated perception and taste, is the master of a higher state robe, and holds the key of embroidered vestments, cosmetics, tintings, artistries, hair-jewels, head-dresses, brooches, and bracelets, which no empress ever wore since human crowns were made; which Nature herself could not show on all the bygone birthdays of her being.

This is marvellous.  It is an honor to man, put upon him from above, as one of the gratuitous dignities of his being.  “An undevout astronomer is mad,” said one who had opened his mind to a broad grasp of the wonders which this upper heaven holds in its bosom.  The floriculturist is an astronomer, with Newton’s telescope reversed; and if its revelations do not stir up holy thoughts in his soul, he is blind as well as mad.  No glass, no geometry that Newton ever lifted at the